RECAP: my eleventh week at a small newspaper

As I write this it is well into the middle of August and I have completely missed writing my recap blogs for the last month! My sincerest apologies readers, I mean, no one, as there are no readers, hahaha.

Instead of going with my usual format and writing what happened, what I felt, and how each day of the week went, as with prior blog entries, I’m going to summarize the entirety of the week in one because I honestly don’t remember what I felt and what happened on each individual day anymore..whoops!

Also, due to my being as behind in blog posts as I am, I’m suspending the ‘What I learned This Week’ section until I may caught up to the present week!

Monday, July 14 – Friday, July 18:

According to my stories folder for the July 18th edition paper, I wrote four stories— Alberta’s Next Top Model, Best of St. Albert, iPhone, and a Special Education Story. My brain is now working in full force trying to recall what I experienced with each story and so here I go …

The way I came up with the story of ANTM (lol at Alberta’s Next Top Model having the same acronym as America’s Next Top Model) was through… FACEBOOK! There was an ad on the side of my Facebook page advertising this provincial modeling contest and I thought, hey! St. Albert is in Alberta, girls and guys between the ages of 13-23 (or whatever the age range was, at this point I’ve forgotten) live here, and auditions are this weekend, so it’s current and great timing for the issue (which comes out on Fridays). Viola story~ The contact I talked to, I remember, said ‘Ciao!’ at the end of the interview which I thought was so funny in a semi Hollywood-endearing kind of way. It was a fun story to write, I myself will likely not tune in (actually it’s not televised but they’re working on getting it televised next year for ‘season 2’) to their website to vote but hopefully my story peaked the interest of up-and-coming models and/or model followers (I’m sure those exist.)

The Best of St. Albert story was a very small story and really just filler. Every year the paper – Wait I just realized that up until this point I don’t think I’ve ever said that the city / paper I’m working in / for is St. Albert I just called it a ‘city’ and a ‘small paper’, I’m not sure how I feel about everyone knowing I’m in St. Albert now… ha oh wait, no one reads this anyway – so the paper each year puts on a city-wide survey asking readers to vote for their favourite store, restaurant, etc, you know those kinds of categories. Winners are then published in a special section that includes some filler stories about the history of some of the businesses and their excitement on being picked the most favourite, and things like that. (Actually I think if it’s called ‘Best of’ then it should be ‘You were voted BEST bla bla’ not ‘You were voted MOST FAVOURITE bla bla’ because then shouldn’t it be called ‘The Favourite of St. Albert?’ [/side thought]) So I did up a story about the city’s favourite dog grooming business (there are like 10+ here which shocks me because it is such a small city). Not much else to recollect with that except I went down to take a photo and the owner was wearing pink scrubs which is awesome (I love pink.)

The iPhone story is technically iPhone story 2.0 because I had written a story about the iPhone finally being released for the previous week’s edition, but then I had actually gone to the launch at two Rogers stores in the city and wrote this iPhone 2.0 story about the actual launch. I’m pretty sure I wrote about what I experienced at the launch already, since it landed on a Friday which was part of my previous entry (I’m too lazy to actually LOOK to see if I did write about it though) but all in all it was fun. I don’t want to an iPhone though, my cousin has one and I tried to text and type with it, my chubby fingers made it nearly impossible and for being someone who texts and types blazingly fast (yes, blazingly) all the time, being slow and hitting the backspace button to correct myself with the iPhone was not impressive to me.

And lastly the special education story was about how the province is setting up a committee to look at how special ed in Alberta can be fine-tuned, improved, etc. That turned out to be a good story, actually. This community organization that caters to those with special needs in Edmonton actually saw the story and emailed my editor asking if it was okay to reprint the story in their newsletter! I was beyond stoked.

And that wraps up my July 14th to 18th week. I’m sure I had a lot of complaints about people not returning calls or people not being in their office when I call or having to stay late on Wednesdays or being bored, but luckily I have no recollection of this at this time and therefore will not be complaining about it!

I will now proceed to posting this and then writing up my weekly recap for July 21st to 25th!